


shadows of the mess you made

by cheloniidae



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23298895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: In the solitude of an empty lab, late enough into the night that purists would classify it as morning, Phineas Welles pipettes samples of a dead man’s blood onto a microplate. The plate has twenty-four sample wells, allowing him to test for twenty-four chemicals that might have triggered Dr. Johan Rinne’s cardiac arrest.Four months after Tartarus, a Hope colonist dies of supposedly natural causes. Phineas investigates.
Relationships: The Captain & Phineas Welles
Comments: 5
Kudos: 51





	shadows of the mess you made

In the solitude of an empty lab, late enough into the night that purists would classify it as morning, Phineas Welles pipettes samples of a dead man’s blood onto a microplate. The plate has twenty-four sample wells, allowing him to test for twenty-four chemicals that might have triggered Dr. Johan Rinne’s cardiac arrest.

It could all be a waste of time. Rinne’s death truly could be from natural causes, as the rest of the colony believes. He was slightly younger than the average cardiac arrest victim — biologically speaking, if not chronologically speaking — but his thawing left him with a persistent arrhythmia. He was susceptible. Of all the ways he could have died, cardiac arrest was the most likely.

Which is why, if someone wanted to assassinate him without revealing their tracks, inducing it would be the cleanest method.

The world has changed since Leah stormed Tartarus four months ago. The paranoia that kept Phineas alive as a fugitive might be a vestigial adaptation, no more useful than the eyes of Monarchian cavefish. Might be. But his mind keeps returning to two simple facts, again and again. One: Rinne’s death is an incalculable loss for the Halcyon Recovery and Oversight Commission. Two: Any loss for the Commission is a victory for the Board.

A soft knock on Phineas’s door interrupts him. Only one possibility for who it might be. Phineas re-arranges his work table so that his current project is hidden from view, calls, “Come in,” and unlocks the door from his terminal. (The door is always locked, even when he’s the only person in the lab. Another vestigial precaution from life as a fugitive; another habit he hasn’t been able to shake.)

Leah doesn’t enter past the doorway. “Figured you’d still be up,” she says. Her hair is starting to escape the severe bun she keeps it in; after months of working side by side, Phineas has learned that this is a sign of exhaustion in her, just as certain as the roughness in her voice and the dark circles under her eyes.

“Was the wake, ah, successful?” asks Phineas, still not entirely clear on the purpose of the tradition. Earthers have so many ways of mourning that keeping track of them all would take more brain-space than he’s willing to allocate: wakes, candles, black armbands, moratoriums on mirrors— just to name a handful of the ones he’s aware of. He’s most familiar with the armbands, solely because Leah has worn hers every day since Tartarus.

Dr. Rinne wore one, too, come to think of it.

“I don’t think they have a failure state,” says Leah. “Most of the others were there. Fifty-three of them asked me to pass on thanks to you, so, here I am. Message delivered.”

Phineas waves it off. Before Leah and Tartarus and the Commission, he hypothesized that hearing thanks from the Hope colonists would lessen his guilt. Nearly one hundred trials show the opposite correlation. “You should have told them they have nothing to thank me for,” he says, out of reflex. “They’re the ones saving the colony, after all.”

Leah almost seems to flinch, but it’s only the beginnings of a yawn. “Y’know, you could try saying ‘you’re welcome’, for once.” She rubs at her eyes, stifles a second yawn. “Anyway. Anything happen I should know about while I was gone, or can I go collapse ‘til thaw prep?”

“Go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Halfway out the door, Leah pauses. “Try to get some sleep before then, will you? I swear to Law, I got twice as much as you during residency.”

“I’ll make no promises,” says Phineas.

The door closes behind Leah, leaving Phineas alone, and he returns to the task at hand. He loves her, of course. It isn’t a romantic love, nor familial. He loves Leah Hirsch as a drowning man loves the life raft, and he loves her as Ebihara must have loved the first functional skip drive. His first and greatest success. The best thing that ever happened to Halcyon. And because he’s asked enough of her already, he won’t burden her with his suspicions until he has proof.

A handful of minutes later, his terminal pings: a message from Leah, marked PRIORITY: URGENT. It must be about Rinne, is his first thought. Maybe she shares his suspicions; maybe she found evidence; maybe—

But the message is nothing more than a list of links to five separate clinical studies on the cognitive benefits of sleep. Below the links, Leah has written a post-script: _If you won’t listen to one MD, maybe you’ll listen to 13._

If the studies were applicable to Phineas’s situation, she would have a point— but they aren’t. He knows, without needing to open any of them, that their participants were all able to sleep for more than four hours at a time without being woken by the memory of a thrashing-screaming-melting test subject. The oversight isn’t Leah’s fault, though. She doesn’t know about the nightmares, nor the experiments they originate from, and that’s how things will stay: Phineas bearing the burden of his crimes alone, as he deserves to.

How could he sleep now, anyway? He has a possible murder to prove.

* * *

“Welcome to Halcyon, Dr. Song,” says Leah, under her breath. “We were asleep for seventy years, and it gets worse.”

Dr. Amahle Song can’t hear her, of course. At fifteen hours into the dehibernation process, she is, by all medical definitions, just a frozen corpse lying half-reclined in a hospital bed. No pulse, no brain activity. “Are you revising your welcome speech?” asks Phineas, not looking up from his microscope. Song’s cellular samples are promising so far, with the three he’s examined showing no signs of impending cell membrane dissolution, but Law knows what the remaining two might hold.

“Mhm. That’s exactly what I’m gonna tell her.”

Phineas starts to make a suggestion, gets one syllable in, and realizes. “You’re being sarcastic.”

“You caught me.”

A handful of minutes tick by in tense silence before Phineas announces, “All samples clear,” and rises to stand with Leah at Song’s bedside. Monitors behind Song track her progress: one for vital signs, an ECG for heart activity, an EEG for brain activity. Every line is flat, except for core temperature, which steadily climbs up and to the right.

They aren’t ‘out of the woods’ yet, to use one of the Earth phrases Leah is fond of. No matter how textbook Song’s dehibernation has been so far (or would be, if Phineas had time to update the textbooks), the real moment of truth won’t come until she starts breathing.

Explosive cell death has two possible triggers: the thawing of the cells, and the resumption of aerobic respiration. The Hope’s cannibals vanquished the first decades before Phineas set foot on the ship; when UDL sent him to examine the ship’s skip drive, he found Frank Nolda’s research waiting for him on the maintenance terminal, begging to be used. He’d thought that bridging the gap between solid corpse and solid living human would be a simple question of thermodynamics. He’d thought, with all the arrogance of youth, that it would be easy. He would spend a month proving Corporate wrong, or two at the most, and he’d return to his lab in Byzantium with another figurative feather in his cap.

He thought it would be easy, and he’s spent more than half his life paying for the miscalculation.

“Five minutes until total thaw,” says Leah, and she begins the final preparation for Song’s dehibernation: filling a syringe with 450 milliliters of morphine. More than a lethal dose. When Phineas first saw it on the preparation checklist, he’d asked what it was for, and Leah had answered, flatly, no humor in her eyes: _So they don’t have to suffer_. She’s used the syringe three times since then. The screaming never lasts more than a second, never progresses to the thrashing that Phineas remembers so well. It’s a mercy for him as much as it is for the colonists.

It never occurred to him, when he was working on his own, that cutting the screams short might be worth sullying the data.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” asks Phineas, forcing his hands to unclench. Song will be _fine_. The procedure has a ninety-six percent chance of success. Sixty-eight percent higher than the procedure that revived Leah, and Leah is here, alive, helping him.

More minutes pass. “Thirty seconds until total thaw,” says Leah. “Ten. Five.” 

The hibernation suit’s chest compressor starts to thump, and Phineas starts the timer. The artificial pulse will keep Song’s tissue oxygenated until her heart restarts— if it restarts. The timer counts ten seconds, then twenty, then thirty. “Thirty-six seconds before pulse,” announces Phineas, when the thumping stops. Dr. Song’s heart is steadily beating, and her body hasn’t started to liquefy. Immensely promising.

“Longer than usual,” says Leah. “ECG looks normal, though.”

“As does her brain activity,” says Phineas, intently watching the EEG. “As far as we can tell with electrodes, anyway.” A brain probe would give them a much clearer view into her brain activity _and_ allow them to monitor neurochemical production, but Leah is adamantly against it. Phineas doesn’t see why. He opened up Leah’s cranium while he was reviving her, and she was perfectly fine. (Aside from a minor case of brain damage resulting in loss of feeling in her left heel and right earlobe, but really, who even needs that?)

“We’ve been over this.”

“I know, I know. I’ll abide by your stance on ‘medically unnecessary invasive procedures’. We _are_ a team, after— Aha, alpha waves!” Phineas claps his hands together. “Our frigid friend is waking up. How exciting.”

Song twitches, coughs, continues to not melt. For the first time in seventy years, her eyes flutter open, and she looks around the orbital lab’s medical bay. When Phineas first came to the lab, the medical bay was in utter disrepair, seemingly the epicenter of whatever incident caused Auntie Cleo to abandon the lab in the first place. It would have remained that way, if not for Leah’s insistence that they have a designated room for performing dehibernations. The beds have been replaced; the blood scrubbed from the floor and walls and ceiling. It’s now, to all appearances, a boringly standard medical bay. Nothing to give a waking colonist any cause for alarm.

Leah surreptitiously sets the syringe down. “Welcome to Halcyon, Dr. Song,” she says, kindly. “I’m Dr. Leah Hirsch, and that’s Dr. Phineas Welles. How are you feeling?”

“Hungry,” Song croaks. She coughs and clears her throat. “They didn’t let us eat before boarding.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to hold on just a little longer. Your digestive system needs a little time to wake up before you go putting food in it. I learned that the hard way. I’m from the Hope, too.”

Song’s eyes crinkle with amusement. “‘The hard way,’ hm? We’re how-many lightyears from Earth, in an entirely new solar system, and MDs still refuse to listen to their doctors. It’s comforting to know some things don’t change.”

“I know,” says Leah, grinning, before Phineas has a chance to point out she never received any orders of the kind. “We’re always the worst patients.”

Song looks the two of them up and down. “What company are you two with? I don’t see any badges.”

“Clip badges?” asks Phineas. “Those old things have been obsolete for decades. Everyone uses biometric IDs, now. Much more secure.” (They were still in use when Phineas made his abrupt departure from UDL; he incinerated his, vented the ashes into space, and watched with satisfaction as they disappeared into the aether.)

“We’re with the Earth Directorate,” Leah cuts in, shooting Phineas a sharp look. Ah, right. Not the point of the question. “You can think of us as a corporation-neutral welcoming committee.”

Song looks around the room, again examining it: the sterile white walls, the empty beds on either side of her, the medical auto-mechanical on standby in the corner. She smiles, not happily. “I’m here because something went wrong with my stasis, aren’t I? You can’t give all three hundred thousand colonists this kind of a red carpet. There aren’t enough doctors for it this side of the milky way.”

Leah puts on her gentle but serious doctor-giving-bad-news voice. “Nothing went wrong with your stasis, but something went wrong with the Hope. It dropped out of skip space on the way to Halcyon, and we had to finish the rest of the journey on STL. We left Earth seventy years ago. I’m sorry.”

Song bursts into laughter, which quickly devolves into a coughing fit. “Funny,” she wheezes. “You got me for a moment. I’d heard Rizzo’s new-hire hazings were legendary, but this? Bravissimo.”

“I know it’s hard to accept, but—”

“The ten year rule is an iron-clad law of cryonics. If we were in stasis for seventy years, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We’d both be puddles on the floor.”

“It _was_ an iron-clad law of cryonics,” says Phineas, proudly, “until I devised a way to dehibernate you without you melting in the process. We’ve pumped you full of dimethyl sulfoxide — marvelously useful chemical — to keep your cells from liquefying. I’ll make sure you have access to the paper. I’m certain a pharmacologist of your caliber will appreciate the chemistry involved.”

“Dimethyl—“ Song falls silent, gears turning in her head. A spike in pulse on the vitals monitor shows the precise moment she accepts it as plausible. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

“I assure you, this is no joke.”

Song stares into nothing, face blank, like a computer crashing under unexpected input. If not for her ever-climbing heart rate, she would seem utterly calm. Finally, hollowly, she says, “I promised my mother I’d send a message to her on the first skip drone. She must have died waiting for it.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Leah. (Phineas has observed that she always apologizes to each newly-woken colonist a minimum of two times, though she of all people has no reason to.) “We can give you some time alone, if you—”

The EEG’s lines swing wildly with a spike of abnormal brain activity, lasting a fraction of a second, and Song sits up with a start, dislodging a handful of electrodes from her face. She claps a hand over her mouth, breathing in quick, ragged gasps. From between trembling fingers, she says, “Everything— everything just slowed down. What the fuck was that? What the fuck _was_ that?”

Phineas claps his hands together, mentally jotting down the new data point. “You’ve just experienced stress-induced tachypsychia. Time dilation, as your fellow settlers call it. It’s a common side-effect of long-term stasis, nothing to be worried about. How long would you say it lasted, subjectively?”

“A minute. Two. I don’t know. Can you treat it?”

“You won’t want that, I assure you. On-call hyperfast cognitive response is a remarkably useful talent. I’m sure Dr. Hirsch can tell you about all the times it’s saved her life from marauders, eh?”

“ _Marauders_?” Song’s voice rises in pitch. “What the Hell do you mean, marauders? What _happened_ to this place?”

Phineas turns grim. “I’m afraid Halcyon isn’t the idyllic picture the brochures promised. The Board’s mismanagement over the past decades has driven the colony to the brink of total collapse: famine, disease, lack of basic necessities. Halcyon is dying, Dr. Song, and Earth is unable to help us. We’re entirely on our own. If the colony is to survive — if any of us are to survive — we need your help. You and your fellow colonists are some of the most brilliant minds humanity ever sent into space. If anyone is capable of setting things right, you are.”

“Dr. Welles,” says Leah, before Song can reply. Her voice is oddly toneless. “I’ll take it from here.”

* * *

Clarke is three minutes late.

Phineas drums his fingers against his leg, adjusts the communications terminal’s microphone. He doesn’t miss much about life as a fugitive, but Law does he miss the lack of bureaucracy. No managers, no conference calls, no progress reports filed in triplicate, no begging for funding. The only person he needed permission from was himself.

But things are different, now. No matter how brilliant the Hope’s scientists are, if they’re to save Halcyon from the brink of collapse — as only they can — they need resources. Laboratories, equipment, staff, basic necessities; all things that Phineas can’t provide. Fortunately for Halcyon, Leah found an organization willing and able to provide support. Unfortunately for Phineas, it means monthly check-in calls with Aloysius Clarke: Minister of Earth, head of the Halcyon Recovery and Oversight Commission, and elitist Byzantine bastard. 

Leah’s presence is the only thing that makes the calls tolerable, but she’s still in the medical bay with Song, three hours after Song woke up. Phineas — as the freelancer formally in charge of the Hope colonist revival project — has to handle this one himself.

Finally, five minutes late, the call comes in.

“Can you hear me?” asks Phineas.

“I can hear you, Dr. Welles,” says Clarke. It’s evening in Byzantium; the sun sets behind Clarke through floor-to-ceiling windows, backlighting him, and the communications software compensates by washing out the rest of the office in searing brightness that doesn’t do Phineas’s headache any favors. One of life’s little ironies: Rockwell stole Clarke’s office, and now that Rockwell is dead, Clarke has stolen his. “Will Leah be joining us? I don’t see her.”

“Later, perhaps. She’s still with Dr. Song.” Phineas can’t understand why Leah allows Clarke to call her by first name. It’s only natural they share some kinship, hailing from the same planet, but for Law’s sake, it doesn’t mean they have to be _friends_. Still— he trusts her judgment. Trusts her to not be corrupted by Byzantine influence.

“I should congratulate you on another successful dehibernation. This marks one hundred, doesn’t it? Quite a milestone.”

“If your standards are low enough to call a third of one tenth of one percent a milestone.” (It _is_ a milestone, but Phineas will be damned if he sits here and takes praise from Clarke.) “Can we get to business?”

“Of course, of course. I have good news and bad news. Which do you want to start with?”

“The bad news.”

“I’m disqualifying two of your candidates after background checks turned up family on the Hope. Dr. Morgan Nguyen has a stepbrother, and Dr. Helen Fischer has a fiancee who also has a son.”

 _Damn and blast,_ thinks Phineas. The facts, cold and inescapable, are this: Phineas’s supply of dimethyl sulfoxide and Halcyon’s supply of food are both severely limited. For a Hope colonist to be revived, another must remain in stasis; for a Hope colonist to be fed, a Halcyonite must starve. Until circumstances improve, only colonists who can uniquely contribute to the Commission’s recovery efforts are eligible for revival— and even if a colonist qualifies, their family almost certainly won’t. Clarke is convinced this would end in disaster. Thus, the verdict from on high: no reviving colonists with strong ties to others on the Hope.

(In the silent parts of himself that he doesn’t acknowledge, Phineas is grateful for the restriction. No chance of being forced to explain why he killed someone’s brother, sister, daughter, son.)

“When do you need the replacements?” asks Phineas.

“End of day Thursday, if you want them on January’s slate.”

Another advantage of being an outlaw, Phineas thinks wryly: plenty risk of death, but no risk of deadlines. “We’ll get the names to you. What’s the good news?”

“We’re allocating— Ah, Leah! There you are. Just in time. How did things go with Dr. Song?”

“Clean bill of health,” says Leah, taking the chair next to Phineas. “I’m taking her planetside tomorrow.”

“Excellent news— and I have some for you. I was just about to tell Dr. Welles that you’re being allotted five additional revivals in March for crop engineers. Once we have the manufacturing and distribution in place for fertilizer, we want to encourage settlers to start gardening.”

“For which they’ll need new seed varieties,” Phineas concludes. 

“Quick on the uptake as always, Dr. Welles.”

“Will people go along with it?” asks Leah, frowning. “Most of them aren’t fans of anything that comes out of the ground.”

“We’re working to change that perception,” says Clarke, rummaging for something offscreen. “These will be all over the colony. Where did I— Here it is.” He holds up a poster: A man in dirt-smeared work clothes stands in a green field, proudly holding a basket brimming with various vegetables. Everything is rendered in bright, optimistic colors. FIGHT FAMINE, the poster instructs. GROW VITAMINS OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR. 

“That man must be a very good farmer,” Phineas says, in an aside to Leah. “He’s out standing in his field. Get it?”

Leah wordlessly pinches the bridge of her nose, while Clarke — whom the joke wasn’t meant for — laughs uproariously. “Out standing in his field. Oh, you are a riot, Dr. Welles.”

“Don’t drive it into the ground, Clarke.”

“Can you get us projections for where people are most likely to start growing food, and what they’ll be willing to eat?” asks Leah, pointedly pulling them back on topic. “Off the top of my head, I can think of thirty colonists who fit the bill. If we’re gonna narrow that down to the five best candidates, we need more specifics.”

“Of course. I’ll send you projections tonight, along with full ecology reports.”

“Did you have any questions about January’s slate?”

“Two disqualifications that I went over with Dr. Welles. Beyond that, everything is set. Do either of you have issues you want to discuss? Problems the Commission can assist with?”

Leah glances at Phineas, and he shakes his head. “Nothing from us,” she says.

A mercifully short call, thinks Phineas. “If that’s all, Clarke?”

“That’s all the business for today, but Leah, while I have you on the line, I thought you might want to see something I had my staff dig out of storage.” Clarke holds up a small painting, barely larger than an index card, of a waterfront city silhouetted by sunset or sunrise. A bridge splits the city into two halves, and Sol — impossibly large in Earth’s barren, ringless sky — sits in the center, just grazing the water. One of the buildings on the right half towers above the others, its silhouette angular and distinct. A landmark, but not one Phineas recognizes.

Leah inhales a sharp stab of breath. “New Edison?”

“Our conversation reminded me of a souvenir I picked up there in the twenties, a few years before I came here. I’m relieved it’s recognizable.”

“That building on the right’s new. Everything else is how it was. I’d know it anywhere.”

“Should I send it to you?”

“Yes,” says Leah, immediately. “Thank you. Yes. It’s perfect.”

From offscreen, a man’s voice says something unintelligible, and Clarke makes a pained face. “My secretary tells me the CEO of Hammersmith is attempting to call, so I regrettably must trade your company for his. Take care, Leah, Dr. Welles.”

“You too,” says Leah.

“Out standing in his field,” repeats Clarke, chuckling to himself. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

The screen goes dark.

“Who’re the DQs?” asks Leah. “I’ll handle finding replacements.”

“Nguyen and Fischer. Clarke wants them by Thursday.” Phineas pauses, then asks in a tone he’s 85% certain is sufficiently casual, “What did he mean by your ‘conversation’?”

“We were talking about home. Our homes on Earth, I mean. New Edison was where I—” Leah shakes her head, fiddles with her armband. “Anyway. I told Dr. Song I’d make pasta for dinner. Want any?”

His refusal comes automatically. “No, thank you,” says Phineas, standing. His right knee hasn’t been the same since Tartarus; he tries and fails not to wince as it twinges. “I should get back to work. The dimethyl sulfoxide we need won’t manufacture itself, after all.”

“Take a vitamin supplement _before_ you get into it, all right? I don’t want a repeat of August.”

“I was perfectly fine.”

“Huh, that’s interesting. Nobody told me ‘perfectly fine’ is Halcyon slang for ‘severely B9 deficient.’ I’ll have to update the guidebook.”

“Sarcasm is the last refuge of the witless,” Phineas huffs, but with more fondness than annoyance. He hasn’t lived with someone who actively cared for his wellbeing since he left home for schooling as a child; even after four months, it’s still a surprisingly pleasant novelty. (A voice in the back of his mind whispers that he doesn’t deserve it; that he has no right to let her take care of him, much less enjoy it. The voice isn’t wrong.) “It’s hardly my fault that C&P changed the composition of their Boarst ’n Beans without notice. But if you _insist_ , I’ll take a supplement before I start working. Hand to Law.”

He turns to leave, and he barely gets two steps before Leah speaks up. “Phineas,” she starts. She doesn’t continue; just watches him the same way she would a particularly concerning ECG readout.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been thinking, since you have so much to do, maybe it should just be me in the room after they wake up. We don’t need two people once the thaw’s done. It’ll be more efficient if I write down all the observations, and you review them later.”

“A sensible plan,” says Phineas. “We can try it with the next thaw. I trust you’ll be thorough.”

Leah returns to her ship for the night (not without reminding him of his promise), and Phineas returns to his habitation. His bottle of Commission-ration vitamins sits on a table near the entrance; he grabs it on the way in, uncaps it with a practiced motion. (Not exactly like Caffenoid bottles, but close enough.) For a handful of seconds, he hesitates. A handful more. _Get a hold of yourself,_ he thinks, tipping a supplement into his palm.

He drops the supplement back into the bottle, and he gets back to work.

* * *

The hibernation suit’s chest compressor continues to thump, squelching against the remains of its former inhabitant. The suit doesn’t know that its colonist is dead. It only knows three things: that its colonist has thawed, that its colonist has no heartbeat, and what it must do if both those conditions are true. Twice a second, compressions force more liquid out of the neck of the suit; an inches-deep layer of organic soup, ever rising, covers the bottom of the hibernation chamber.

Important to keep the chamber flat, when performing these procedures. A messy lesson Phineas learned after his first try.

The colonist’s screams still echo through Hibernation Bay Eight, which is fascinatingly impossible, given that the bay stretches endlessly in all directions. Phineas makes a mental note to investigate the Hope’s anomalous acoustics later. After the next trial, perhaps.

The control panel glows red in the distance. Phineas doesn’t know exactly how long he’s stood here, staring at his most recent failure, but he knows he’s wasted too much time already. The work must continue.

Organic fluid sloshes around his feet as he makes his way towards the faint pinprick of light. It laps at his ankles. His knees. Rising, rising.

Like an elastic band snapping, he suddenly finds himself at the control panel. He promptly makes his selection: chamber #CB8-215. The colonist’s name is unreadable, blurring and shifting, and Phineas thinks nothing of it. This will be subject— One hundred and ten? One hundred and twenty? Odd that he can’t remember. Regardless, no matter how many colonists he experiments on, he’ll never make anything approaching a dent in the Hope’s population. It isn’t as though corporate will complain, anyway, once he informs them of his success. With this many colonists on one ship, they must expect a handful to go missing.

The mechanical arm of the hibernation bay brings his selection forward. The pod is sealed shut, untouched since the day it left Earth, but fluid leaks from it. From all the pods. The fluid rises, up to his chest now, and the shrieks rise with it

louder

The screaming is inside of it, inside his mouth and ears and eyes, and he—

* * *

—jolts awake, heart pounding, bile burning his throat. He peels his face off his desk. Cracks his neck, teeth gritted, and hisses in pain. Collapsing at his desk had few consequences when he was younger, but it’s been thirty-five long years since the screaming first clawed its way through his ears and lodged in his brain like a burrowing insect. He’s nearing the end of his sixties. His mind hasn’t lost its edge, but his body is certainly beginning to.

At the bathroom sink, he washes the taste of bile and corporate slime from his mouth. The worst part of the nightmares — worse than even the screaming, if only by an infinitesimal margin — is being forced to return to his younger self. Without meeting his own gaze, he examines himself in the mirror: wrinkles, gray hair, sagging cheeks. Physical proof of the decades separating him from the bootlicking UDL lackey who shared his name. 

He isn’t that pig anymore. What he is, mostly, is tired. But the nightmare still clings to him, and he knows, without needing to try, that attempting to go back to sleep will be worse than pointless. Another Caffenoid it is.

After a short deliberation, he adds a Focusitol to the mix. Leah has many words to say about mixing stimulants — words like _migraines_ and _heart problems_ and _your blood pressure is crying; I don’t know how you make a number cry, but it says so, right on the chart_ — but Phineas isn’t likely to see her before she departs for Terra 2 with Song. He was mixing them for years before he met her, anyway, and he isn’t dead yet. If his blood pressure suddenly wants to file a complaint, it can give him an aneurysm. He dares it to.

With the pills taking effect, Phineas returns to his terminal and the research notes he fell asleep halfway through reading. The notes — the parts that haven’t been redacted — describe the unsuccessful efforts of a nameless Auntie Cleo’s researcher to improve the efficiency of their dimethyl sulfoxide manufacturing. Auntie Cleo grudgingly turned them over to the Commission last week, along with hundreds of other DMSO-related documents, and the Commission passed them on to Phineas.

Even with all the information they contain, he’s still far from being able to synthesize enough of the chemical for every settler on the Hope. And he _will_ save them all, by Law, even if he has to crawl out of his own damn grave to do it.

His mind jumps to Dr. Rinne, buried somewhere on Terra 2, and he remembers: It’s been twenty hours since he put the samples in the incubator. They're ready for analysis.

Two of the twenty-four wells on the sample plate have positive results. Phineas checks the two-letter labels against his hand-written legend. The first positive is esomeprazole. An expected result, given that Rinne was prescribed it for heartburn. And the second—

Before Phineas makes a conscious decision, his feet are sprinting to the Unreliable.

* * *

“This is unusual,” says ADA. “Hello, Dr. Welles. I hope you aren’t here to involve the Captain in an irrational scheme.”

Phineas has neither the breath nor the time to answer. He heads straight for the stairs leading to Leah’s quarters. By the time he reaches the top, Leah is standing in her doorway, waiting for him. She’s bundled up against the cold, in fleece pants and an oversized sweater, and something about her appearance is off. Her armband, Phineas realizes. She isn’t wearing it.

“What the Hell’s going on?” she asks, blearily.

Phineas’s fingers drum a rapid rhythm against his leg. “I need to speak to you about a sensitive matter.” On the last two words, his eyes flick up to the ceiling meaningfully. He (seventy-three percent) trusts ADA herself, but recordings can be exfiltrated; sensors can be hijacked. Until he and Leah decide on a course of action, it’s best to ensure any prying eyes remain in the dark.

“ADA,” says Leah, “can you give us some privacy?”

“Yes, Captain. I am capable of that action.”

“New rule. No I-am-a-literal-robot schtick until after five AM.”

“I am not a robot. I am an—”

“Autonomous Digital Astrogator. I know.”

“Very well, Captain. Please be advised that if you are crushed under a falling object while my sensors are disabled, I will be unable to detect that you require help.” An ostentatious sequence of three descending beeps plays from the ceiling, signaling ADA’s compliance.

“Well?” prompts Leah. “What’s the emergency?”

“I performed a toxicology screen on a sample of Dr. Rinne’s blood,” says Phineas. “It—“

“Wait, you ran a tox screen? Why?”

“This wouldn’t be the first time the Board has assassinated a scientist from a rival organization. At first, I thought I was merely being paranoid— but I was _right_. His blood contained amphetamines, which he wouldn’t take knowingly, given his arrhythmia. Some agent of the Board must have switched his regular medications.”

Phineas expects Leah to be alarmed. He doesn’t expect her to sag against the doorway, shoulders slumped. “Nobody switched his meds,” she says, quietly, tiredly. “He knew what he was taking.”

“What?”

“One of the researchers from his lab told me at the wake. A few days before he died, he told her he needed help focusing on his work, and he asked for some Focusitol. She didn’t know about his arrhythmia. She kept crying, saying it was her fault, but Johan... He knew the risks. He must’ve thought it was worth it.”

“This researcher you spoke to. Did she inform anyone else about her role in Rinne’s death?”

“Just me,” says Leah, warily, as though she can tell where the question is leading.

“Aha! As I expected. You don’t find it convenient that she preemptively stepped forward to claim responsibility? And that she targeted you, specifically, for this confession?”

“Phineas. Don’t do this.”

“Think about it logically for a moment. The Board is terrified of you after what you did at Tartarus, and they’re right to be. They would stoop to any means to throw you off the scent.”

“The Board had nothing to do with it! For fuck’s sake, this is why I didn’t want to tell you! I knew, as soon as you heard something caused the heart attack, you’d blame it on the Board. _We’re_ the ones who made him—” Leah stops herself mid-sentence, and the hallway rings with silence, soundless but for the ionized mercury humming agitation from the overhead lights.

A chill runs through Phineas. He swallows tightly, and he says, “You were going to say that we’re responsible for his arrhythmia.”

For a moment, Leah stares wordlessly down at the floor. All the anger has gone out of her posture, receding like a flood, leaving nothing but exhaustion in its wake. She looks more defeated than Phineas has ever seen her. She opens her mouth, closes it. “Right,” she says, quietly, still not looking at him. “That’s what I was gonna say.”

Phineas doesn’t argue, because there are no arguments. It’s a simple fact of record: Rinne boarded the Hope with a normal heartbeat, and he left the laboratory with an abnormal one.

Another silence passes between them. This time, Leah is the one to break it. “I know that researcher wasn’t lying, because I talked to Johan twice that week. He told me the same thing he told her, about not being able to focus.”

Phineas frowns, perplexed. “You knew something was wrong with him, and you didn’t bring him here for examination?”

“If it was a medical problem, I would’ve. But it wasn’t. He was just…”

“Just what?”

“Grieving.” Leah touches the spot on her arm where her armband would be, were she wearing it. “He was grieving, and he knew how many people were counting on him. Something had to give.”

Phineas doesn’t have much experience with grief, but guilt is its cousin, and he’s all too familiar with that. He knows how it clouds the mind, and he knows the measures he’s taken to push it aside for the sake of making progress. After all, he’s on a mixture of amphetamine and caffeine right now, despite Leah’s repeated warnings. “You’re certain he meant to take the amphetamines?” asks Phineas, just to hear it out loud.

“I am.”

It’s settled, then. Phineas should be relieved, shouldn’t he? His investigation has reached the best conclusion that any murder investigation can hope for: the revelation that that there was, in fact, no murder at all. The Board doesn’t yet feel confident enough to target Hope colonists for assassination, and that news is indisputably good news. He should be relieved that Dr. Rinne’s only cause of death was the arrhythmia given to him by the thawing process.

He _is_ relieved, he tells himself. Of course he is.

* * *

While Leah transports Song to where she’ll be working, it falls to Phineas to fetch their next scheduled thaw from the Hope. Nancy Calloway, age forty-eight, whose work in virology earned a list of awards longer than a UDL requisition form.

He shifts from foot to foot, a finger drumming against his leg, waiting for the mechanical arm to bring his selection over. Dr. Calloway is in bay eight, the same bay he drew nearly all of his test subject from. He never likes to spend longer here than he has to. It makes his skin itch.

He was thirty-three when he first set foot in this spot. Older than Newton when he invented calculus, older than Ebihara when she revolutionized physics with the first successful skip jump. He was so damn desperate to accomplish something impossible; so damn corrupted by the Board that he couldn’t see the colonists as people, just stepping stones for scientific advancement. The fault was his, yes, but not his alone. That’s how the Board operates: They turn humans into resources, into profits, into test subjects. On the wanted posters they littered around the colony, they didn’t call his crime murder. Their official term for it was ‘destruction of Board property.’

Phineas has broken free of their influence as much as anyone raised under their influence can. He’s seen things clearly ever since he ran from UDL. The Hope colonists aren’t property; they’re Halcyon’s lone chance for salvation.

(And he made that salvation possible. It isn’t atonement – there is no atonement, not for him, not ever – but it’s the closest thing he can grasp, and he’ll clutch it with both fists until someone pries his dead fingers away.)

“It’s your lucky day, friend,” says Phineas, to the unhearing colonist. “We’re all counting on you.”


End file.
